Purple Rain (film and album)

Purple Rain is the title of both a film and an album by Prince, released in 1984. The album gave the twenty-six-year-old Minneapolis native his first Number One hits, and the movie, while not critically lauded, was a box office success. The film, album, and subsequent worldwide tour propelled Prince’s rising star into the stratosphere, making him as famous as contemporaries like Michael Jackson and Madonna.

By his late teens, Prince had already worked as a session musician, recorded original songs, and learned studio recording techniques. He produced, arranged, composed, and performed all the songs on his demo tapes, which landed him a three-record recording contract with Warner Bros. His first five albums were released between 1978 and 1982; to promote the last of these (1999), he filmed music videos that aired on the newly launched MTV. He achieved growing success with each release but was by no means a household name.

The young artist envisioned a major motion picture as early as 1982, sketching out a story he called "Dreams." After he pitched the idea to Warner Bros., the studio hired screenwriter William Blinn and director Albert Magnoli to develop Prince’s story into the plot of Purple Rain. In the movie, Prince’s character, known simply as the Kid, is a struggling musician who leads the band the Revolution. The charismatic Morris Day and his band The Time are their rivals, and both bands are fighting to stay on the bill at Minneapolis’s biggest club, First Avenue. The two male leads fight for the affections of Apollonia, a dancer and singer also hoping to make it big at the famous club. The Kid struggles at home, where he witnesses his father abusing his mother, and with his band members, whose musical ideas he discounts. Ultimately, the Kid confronts and overcomes patterns of intergenerational abuse, learns to be vulnerable and trust others, and triumphs over the critics who had written him off.

While the script was being finalized, Prince spent 1983 writing and recording songs not only for the Revolution, but for Morris Day and The Time and Apollonia’s group, Apollonia 6. An astute businessperson, Prince realized he could put out three albums instead of one soundtrack. Purple Rain was not a soundtrack; the album contained only songs by Prince and the Revolution, presented in a different order than in the movie. The songs by Morris Day and The Time and Apollonia 6 were released as separate albums and were essentially Prince releases. Prince wrote, performed, and engineered all of the music, with Day and the Apollonia 6 singers providing only vocals.

To prepare for filming, all the Purple Rain musicians took acting and dancing classes (the latter with the Minnesota Dance Theatre, MDT). Prince wanted to support the financially struggling MDT, so on August 3, 1983, the Revolution headlined a fundraiser for them at First Avenue. The impact of that night, which raised $23,000 for MDT, extended beyond fundraising. When Prince listened to a recording of the live performance, he realized the audio quality was high, and the reaction from the crowd was electric. As a result, he used the versions of “I Would Die 4 U,” “Baby I’m A Star,” and “Purple Rain” recorded that night at First Avenue on the album and in the movie.

The album was released on June 25 and the movie on July 27, 1984. Although it was a relatively low-budget production with a rookie cast, the movie grossed $70 million at the box office, and the album sold millions of copies by the fall. The album also gave Prince his first Number One hits: “Let’s Go Crazy” and “When Doves Cry.” While the movie’s climactic song of the same name reached only Number Two on the charts, in 1985 it brought Prince another accolade: the Oscar for Best Original Song Score for “Purple Rain.” The Purple Rain worldwide tour, launched that fall and continued through April 1985, solidified Prince as a superstar.

The Purple Rain album consistently ranks highly among the entertainment industry’s lists of the top albums of all time. The album’s significance has been recognized not only in popular culture, but also by the National Recording Preservation Board, which included it in the National Recording Registry in 2012.